Email marketing is a perfect automation tool to give visibility to your business. It is one of the tools that establishes communication with your customers or potential customers through emails. Its objective, after all, is to attract new customers, interact with the ones you already have or confirm the purchase of a product, among other things.
All the functionalities that email marketing includes are, therefore, vital for your business, so you must choose very well how you are going to use this tool. That is why you must be very careful when sending emails, because they can end up arriving as spam or junk mail.
You have to be very careful to avoid that your mail arrives as spam, because if your messages end up in the spam folder, it can mean the difference between success and failure of your online business.
Below, we will explain the concept of spam and give you some tips on how to avoid your emails ending up on the spam list, so read on!
what is spam?
The Office of Internet Security defines spam as:
"Spam refers to unsolicited messages, mainly of an advertising nature, sent in bulk. The most commonly used form of delivery is email, but it can also be sent via instant messaging programmes or social networks".
But who is in charge of defining when an email is spam?
Gmail's own platform automatically identifies suspicious emails and marks them as spam. When you open the Spam label, you see all the messages marked as spam by you or by Gmail. At the top of each email, Gmail displays a label explaining why it has placed it as spam.
Therefore, an email can be considered spam if it includes any of these three characteristics:
- Bulk- A list of bulk emails that are sent unsolicited, and usually come from an address that is unreliable or has a very poor domain reputation.
- Unsolicited: Normally, the user has not given permission to receive this type of mail, which is usually advertising.
- Anonymous: A large proportion of these emails come from fake addresses, and in some cases, the address is anonymous.
To avoid that the emails your company sends to users end up in this list, it is very important to follow certain regular practices so that your emails end up reaching your desired audience. Below, we are going to offer some tips to prevent your emails from arriving as spam.
5 tips to prevent your emails from being spammed
- Have a reliable email marketing service
You must have an email marketing service that has a good reputation and allows you to send your emails safely and quickly. For this tool to work optimally must have some features when creating and sending your mass mailings. Some advantages of email marketing are:
- Email marketing is an essential tool to improve our SEO positioning and thus our web traffic.
- Simplify the creation and sending of your mass email marketing campaigns.
- It offers the possibility of automating all our campaigns. By simply creating a campaign and scheduling its delivery, you can send it to a mass audience and continue doing other tasks without running the risk of forgetting to send the campaign.
- Maintain your IP reputation
Depending on the volume of mailings you send, you will have a shared or dedicated IP. If you don't have a large volume of mailings you will use a shared IP.
If you use a dedicated IP you should pay attention to best practices to ensure a good IP reputation and that email providers trust you. You should make sure that your new subscribers have given their permission to receive your emails and are interested in them, or monitor your metrics frequently.
Fortunately, the vast majority of email providers allow you to track your IP reputation directly from your company's control panel, allowing you to have control over your reputation.
- Quality contact list
We must regularly update our contact list. It doesn't matter what content you send to users because there will always be someone who decides to unsubscribe or stop using that email. The reality is that those emails will remain unopened, so it directly affects your deliverability.
So, as the saying goes, it's not about quantity, it's about quality. Remove inactive contacts or emails that no longer contribute anything to your mailing list. From there, you can update your list and include other contacts who are interested in your content.
- Take care of the email subject
The subject line is the first thing that catches your attention when you receive an email, so you should follow a series of guidelines to avoid spam in relation to the subject of an email.
- Avoid including any non-text characters in the subject line. Do not include emoticons, symbols or tags.
- Avoid certain words that can misinterpret the content of the email: FREE, DISCOUNT, WIN, SEX, MONEY.
- Avoid writing everything in capital letters.
- Do not overuse exclamation marks.
- Pay attention to the time of sending
You must be very careful when sending or scheduling emails. It is very important that you send them at a time when you know they will reach the user.
It is not advisable or feasible to send emails at 3 a.m., or at a time when you know that the user will not be available. In addition, thanks to the sending scheduling option you can choose how and when to send your emails.
Sending emails at night or at "non-human" times may result in Gmail considering it as spam.
Spam is content that is unwanted by users. Businesses should pay special attention to the emails they send to their customers or potential customers, as they may end up on the spam list. By following the tips we have included in this post, you can prevent your emails from reaching users as spam.
